The theory of justice that John Rawls spent his life developing and
refining contains dozens of ideas that each have spurred major scholarly
debate. One of these is that the subject of justice is the basic structure
of society. In his major works Rawls gives slightly different formulations
to the concept of basic structure, but the core idea remains the same.
Early in A Theory of Justice Rawls proposes to offer “a
conception of justice as providing in the first instance a standard
whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to
be assessed.”1
Political Liberalism
devotes an entire chapter to explicating what it means to say that the
basic structure is the subject of justice. There Rawls defines basic
structure “as the way in which major social institutions fit
together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and
duties and shape the division of advantages that arise through social
cooperation”.
2 More recently, Rawls reiterates the
notion of the basic structure in
Justice as Fairness: A
Restatement:
The basic structure of a society is the way in which the main
political and social institutions of a society fit together into one
system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and
duties and regulate the division of advantages that arise from social
cooperation over time. The political constitution within an independent
judiciary, the legally recognized forms of property, and the structure of
the economy (for example, as a system of competitive markets with private
property in the means of production), as well as the family in some form,
all belong to the basic structure. The basic structure is the background
social framework within which the activities of associations and
individuals take place. A just basic structure secures what we may call
background justice.”3
A basic claim of Rawls's theory of justice is that political
philosophy should distinguish two levels of moral evaluation, one to do
with individual interaction and the other to do with the background
conditions within which that action takes place. Basic structure refers to
the latter. Theorizing justice should focus primarily on the basic
structure, because the degree of justice or injustice of the basic
structure conditions the way we should evaluate individual interactions or
rules and distributions within particular institutions.4
This position has been contested. See, for example, Cohen 2000, 134–47; Murphy
1998, 251–91. Thomas Pogge answers these criticisms in
defense of the two level understanding of moral; see Pogge 2000, 137–69. I do not have the space in
this essay to elaborate my reasons for siding with Pogge and Rawls on
these issues. I think that Cohen's attempt to reduce issues
of the justice of institutional relations to analysis and evaluation of
individual action and interaction wrongly sacrifices a point of view on
social evaluation that can encompass the accumulated consequences of the
actions of millions of mediated individuals—that is, a structural
view. It is possible to hold the position that evaluations of justice and
injustice pertain primarily to the basic structure of society while also
theorizing a significant place for individual action in promoting justice.
I think that Liam Murphy's more recent work aims to do this. See
Murphy 2000. In recent and current work I aim
also to link issues of basic structure to individual action without
reducing the latter to the former. See Young
2003.
I wish to argue, however, that this insight stands in some tension
with another aspect of Rawls's theory, a tension that emerges
especially in the first passage I quoted above. The claim that the subject
of justice is the basic structure is in tension with Rawls's emphasis
on distributions—of rights and liberties, offices and positions,
income and wealth, and so on. While patterns of the distribution of
resources, opportunities, and income are very important issues of justice,
theoretical focus on them tends to deflect attention from important
aspects of structural processes in at least two ways. First, focus on
distribution pays too little attention to the processes that produce the
distributions. Second, focus on distribution of benefits and burdens
obscures important aspects of structural processes that do not fit well
under a distributive paradigm. Here I will elaborate three such
non-distributive issues: those concerning the social division of labor,
structures of decision making power, and processes that normalize behavior
and attributes of persons. In this discussion I am expanding and I believe
more precisely refining arguments I made some years ago in Justice and
the Politics of Difference.5
In that earlier
discussion, however, I concentrated less than I do here on the idea of
basic structure. This essay also gives more attention to Rawls's
texts, including some published after my earlier chapter. My argument does
not imply that I think that a concern with distribution should be
discarded and replaced by other concerns.
6 This appears to be how Brian Barry interprets the claim as I
made it in Justice and the Politics of Difference, ignoring
explicit statement to that contrary. See Barry
2001a, 269–70, 273.
I claim, instead, that the
subject of social justice is wider than distribution, and that it is
precisely a concern with basic structure that reveals this.
Processes that Produce Distributions
My argument derives in the first place from Karl Marx's criticism
of liberal conceptions of justice. Claims of distributive fairness, in his
opinion, frequently presuppose institutions of private property, wage
labor, and credit, when these might come into question for a more critical
conception of justice. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx
applies this point to proposals for socialist institutions.
Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the
democracy) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration
and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and
hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on
distribution.7
In Marx's view, the relations of production should be the primary
focus of concern, because they condition the distribution of producer and
consumer goods. The relations of production have a distributive
element—namely, that some people own capital resources while most do
not, and therefore most must work for wages in order to live. Relations of
production, however, refer primarily to the processes of investment,
production, marketing, technological invention, and so on, through which
owners accumulate profit by exploiting the labor of some and marginalizing
others.
In the twenty-first century some radical social movements, such as
feminist, queer, anti-racist, and disability movements, have argued that
the social structures producing injustices should be understood as plural,
and not limited to relations of production. The sort of argument that Marx
made, then, needs to be extended to a wider range of basic social
structural phenomena. More often than not, when we ask about the fair
distribution of goods, income, jobs, costs, etc., we presuppose an
existing set of structural relationships whose rules of property,
authority and decision making power, assignment of tasks, positions of
legal or social authority, or everyday conventions already determine much
about the parameters within which distributions can occur. A critical
theory of justice, then, should be equipped to evaluate these social
structures themselves, and not only the distributional alternatives they
circumscribe or that presuppose them.
We need not look only to the socialist tradition to find criticism of
focus on distribution in theorizing justice. Robert Nozick's
libertarian theory criticizes Rawls for focusing on the evaluation of
single time patterns of the distribution of goods among persons. This
focus deflects from the real issues of justice, according to Nozick, which
concern whether these distributive patterns have come about from a process
and history in which people received their due, or whether the process
involved moral wrongs.8
Nozick himself, as well as other libertarians, finds only one
criterion by which the justice of the process should be evaluated: whether
the process has involved voluntary agreements between people at every
stage. If the processes have involved force or fraud, then the resulting
patterns should be altered in a manner that compensates for this
injustice. To the extent that a distributive pattern results from
transactions that are uncoerced and honest, they must be considered just,
no matter how unequal different persons' holdings.
We need not accept that voluntary agreement is the single criterion
for evaluating the justice of processes producing distributive patterns in
order to accept the point that a theory of justice should give a central
place to evaluation of those social processes. I myself reject
Nozick's theory. By regarding the social processes that produce
distributions as a series of individual transactions between individuals,
Nozick himself allows no place for an account and evaluation of a
large-scale set of background conditions to transactions that is the basic
structure of society. As Rawls himself points out in defending the need
for state institutions to regulate economic processes, a pattern can be
the result of a series and aggregate of voluntary agreements with
structural consequences that no one intended, but which endanger the
lives, health and freedom of some.9
Basing a conception of justice only
on the question of whether outcomes are brought about by voluntary
agreement refuses to treat such large social structures produced by the
confluence of microprocesses as coming under judgments of justice.
In spite of these disagreements, the point I draw from Nozick is one I
think he shares with Marx: the processes that produce distributive
patterns are at least as important as the patterns themselves for making
judgments of justice, as well as for understanding how to remedy
injustice. Taking the basic structure as the subject of justice can bring
attention to these processes. To do so, however, we will require a more
developed account of what the basic structure includes and how structural
processes produce injustices than Rawls's theory offers. In the
following sections I offer three features of the basic structure of modern
societies that raise issues of justice additional to distribution of
resources or positions.
Economic Justice and the Division of
Labor
Rawls considers the social division of labor to be a general aspect of
the basic structure of society. Indeed, a division of labor is a
fundamental aspect of a system of social cooperation. It is generally
beneficial for people to develop their different and complementary talents
and specialize in different tasks, thus depending on one another to meet
their needs and satisfy their wants in a more complete and efficient way
than they could on their own.10
There are at least two interpretations one can give to how the social
division of labor raises issues of justice. One sees the question as
distributive in form, the other does not. While both have moral weight, I
think that the second interpretation raises more basic questions about the
justice of institutional organization and social structure.
Under the first interpretation, issues of justice in the division of
labor concern what sort of people do what sort of work; they concern the
pattern of the distribution of persons or kinds of persons among positions
and kinds of positions. If we observe a pattern, for example, in which
menial and servant labor is done primarily by people of color, and people
of color are hardly ever among those with high paid professional
positions, then this raises issues about whether people of color are
unjustly limited to certain occupations.11
Rawls addresses issues of justice concerning the division of labor
primarily with the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Justice
requires the absence of caste or status difference that would bar persons
from pursuing the occupation of their choice in a fair competition for
positions. The procedures for allocating positions should not discriminate
by race, gender, family origin, or other ascriptive characteristics, and
the education system should enable everyone to develop his or her skills
and qualifications as they wish.
I certainly endorse a principle of equal opportunity. Restricting
concern with issues of justice in the division of labor to the question of
how positions are allocated and whether some people's opportunity to
compete for them is unfairly limited, however, locates justice in the
division of labor at a rather superficial level.12
David Miller considers the question of whether a distributive
paradigm of justice does not adequately address issues of justice
concerning the division of labor, and concludes that it does, because the
main issue is a pattern that divides tasks to make them appropriate to
some groups. He thus interprets the main issue of justice regarding the
division of labor to concern the allocation of positions among kinds of
persons. See Miller 1999, 17.
Focus on
the issue of how persons or categories of persons are distributed among
occupations takes as given the definition of occupations themselves and
their relations.
Prior to the question of what people ought to fill which occupation is
the question of how the occupations themselves should be defined. This is
the second interpretation of the question of justice in the division of
labor. How shall we evaluate morally the structure of the occupational
distinctions, the definition of tasks within them, and the relations among
people occupying differing positions within a production, distribution, or
service enterprise? Is it just, for example, that an aspect of the basic
structure of society consists in an occupational pyramid where the more
plentiful positions at the bottom are relatively menial, repetitive, and
subordinate to the decisions of others, while the few positions at the top
carry broad autonomy, decision making power, and prestige?
Let me illustrate these two different ways of considering issues of
justice in the division of labor by reference to gender justice. A
division of labor persists as part of the basic structure of most
societies in the world, which assumes that women devote primary energies
to taking care of children and other dependent family members, while
ideally men are the primary income generators for a family. Feminists
argue that this division of labor is unjust, because it limits
women's opportunities to develop other capacities and achieve public
recognition, and often makes them vulnerable to poverty.
Theorists such as Susan Moller Okin and Eva Feder Kittay have argued
that Rawls's theory of justice is inadequate because he fails to
address issues of the gender division of labor in the family.13
In
Justice as Fairness: A
Restatement, Rawls internalizes this criticism. Proper application of
principles of equal liberty and a principle of fair equality of
opportunity, he says, should suffice to secure equality and independence
for women.
14 Moreover, to the extent that a source of women's
inequality lies “in their greater share in the bearing, nurturing,
and caring for children in the traditional division of labor in the
family, steps need to be taken either to equalize their share or to
compensate them for it”.
15 Rawls follows Okin in proposing
that stay-at-home wives should have an equal legal share in their
husbands' earnings.
This argument conceptualizes issues of justice and the gender division
of labor in distributive terms. Given the structural division between paid
employment and unpaid family work, then either women and men should share
the family work equally, or the partner who performs unpaid work should be
financially compensated by the partner who earns wages. This
interpretation of gender justice leaves unquestioned, however, the
structural division between private domestic care work and public wage and
salaried work.16
I discuss these issues at
greater length in my essay, “Reflections on Families in the Age of
Murphy Brown: On Justice, Gender and Sexuality”. See 1997, 95–113.
This more fundamental
structural issue of the sexual division of labor has far-reaching
implications for the worth of different kinds of labor, employer and labor
market expectations of the shape and length of the working day, and the
form and status of sex segregation and gender stereotyping in more public
paid occupations. Arguably as long as basic institutions treat care work
as primarily the private responsibility of families, social policy will
pay insufficient attention to it. Accepting that this aspect of the basic
structure of most societies in the world today underlies many gender
injustices, of course, does not produce proposals for what should be done
to alter this structural division of labor. That is a complex question
with many possible answers. The point is that theorists, policy makers,
and citizens committed to furthering gender justice have devoted too
little thought to the problem.
17 For a
recent set of essays considering these issues, see Kittay and Feder 2003. I consider these issues
recently in my essay, “The Recognition of Love's Labor:
Considering Axel Honneth's Feminism”, forthcoming in Van der
Brink and Owen.
To take another example, socialist politics historically has
questioned the modern social division of labor which constructs some
occupations as relatively menial, repetitive, and subordinate to the
decisions of others on the one hand, and positions of expertise that carry
broad autonomy and decision-making responsibility on the other hand. This
position suggests that we think of this structure as itself a matter of
justice, even apart from the issue of whether the opportunities for the
more autonomous, skilled, and responsible forms of work tend to be
restricted to members of certain groups. It may be that there are good
arguments for the justice of such a division of labor between the
unskilled and the skilled, the menial and the professional. With an equal
opportunity distributive understanding of justice in the division of
labor, however, the question itself does not arise.
Justice in Decision Making
Another set of issues that tends to be ignored when theorists
formulate issues of justice in distributive terms is decision-making
power.18
David Miller responds to my earlier
claim that a distributively-oriented theory of justice does not properly
take into account issues of decision-making power. He says that there is
something to the criticism, insofar as there are issues of procedural
justice that are not about the distribution of benefits or burdens. To the
extent that there are other more substantive issues of decision-making
power, however, these belong to a normative theory of democracy rather
than justice; Principles of Social Justice. Below I refer to
theorists who refuse this stipulative separation between democracy and
justice, and I am more inclined to agree with them.
Some people
occupy social positions that give them the right to make institutional
decisions, either alone or in small groups. These often have major
consequences for others, for example, in reinforcing structured processes
that create or maintain privilege and disadvantage. Economic decisions are
paramount here. Persons who control investment portfolios or who are major
officers for large corporations and financial institutions have a great
deal of power over the investment of capital resources produced by the
cooperation of many people. They have the power to decide whether
production facilities will be shut down in one location and established or
expanded in another, and to decide whether capital will be invested in
environmentally sound or in damaging productive activities. Indeed, they
have the power to decide whether capital will be invested in speculative
trading with little relation to the provision of goods or services, or in
activities that will enhance the quality of life for many people.
In calling attention to how justice in decision-making power is not
primarily a distributive issue, moreover, I have more than issues of
resource and capital use in mind. Every social institution includes
procedures for deciding ends and means, and usually authorizes occupants
of specific positions to make and implement various kinds of decisions.
Often a small number of people make decisions that affect many
participants in an institution and outside it. Educational institutions
constitute decision-making power about curriculum and student performance
evaluation, for example, which affect students, teachers, and parents in
significant and often far-reaching ways. Religious institutions constitute
power of decision making about organization, membership, form of worship,
and resource use.
These examples raise a major and obvious issue of justice, connected
to issues of the division of labor: is it right for corporate,
educational, religious or other institutions to be structured so that
there are elites with major decision-making power and others who work with
or use the services of the institutions, yet who have little or no power
over the institution's policies, including over those that affect
their own actions? Another way to put the issue of justice at stake here
is: does justice require that the decision-making power of institutions be
organized more democratically? Is there a legitimate distinction to be
made between “public” institutions or governments, whose
decision-making power ought to be democratically organized, and other
institutions, where it need not or should not be?
I agree with Ian Shapiro, among others, that justice calls for a
presumption of democratic decision-making for all institutions,
not only those institutions that we now associate with states or
governments. Although it is possible to justify departure from a principle
of democratic governance on a number of grounds, we ought to assume
democratic decision making structure as a prime facie principle of the
governance of all institutions.19
To be sure, these claims are
contestable, and my purpose here is not primarily to defend them. Rather,
I bring them up to suggest that Rawls's theory of justice does not
have a sufficiently broad and deep understanding of basic structure to
provide guidance in answering them.
Insofar as equal political liberty is one of Rawls's major
concerns, his theory does address issues of justice in decision-making
power. Like most other theorists, however, Rawls assumes a distinction
between public institutions and private institutions, and political
liberties apply only to the former. Justice in decision-making power,
then, refers to an equal right to vote for political decision makers,
together with liberties of speech, assembly, and so on, which enable
citizens publicly to express their political opinions. Rawls also argues
that large inequalities of wealth unacceptably interfere with this
political equality, and thus that tax and inheritance policy should limit
such inequalities.
These are laudable positions, but they leave untouched another set of
issues: decision-making power in non-state institutions of production and
finance. These arguably are more fundamental either than issues of the
concentration of wealth or the means of political influence, because
capital investment decisions condition significantly the distribution of
wealth and the extent to which needs and wants of society's members
will be met in a fair and equitable manner.
In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls raises an
objection to his theory along these lines. Having argued for
property-owning democracy as the best model of basic structural relations
implied by justice as fairness, Rawls admits that the theory does not
consider issues of decision making power in the workplace or over the
general course of the economy. He says that he will not address the issue
except to say that a system of worker-managed firms is consistent with the
two principles of justice.20
This response seems to admit that
his theory, which concentrates on issues of individual liberty and the
distribution of wealth and income, is not equipped to support or refute
claims about injustice in decision-making structures.
Normativity
In my earlier writing on this subject, I suggested that a third
category of issues of justice, which are not well captured by a
distributive paradigm, have to do with “culture”. I had in
mind various ways that the interactive habits, conventions, and everyday
meanings associated with persons and kinds of persons that appear in
literature, popular magazines, film, television, and other media, work to
make some persons or behaviors more valuable than others. The devaluation
or stigmatization of some persons because of their gender position, their
sexuality, their putative “race,” and so on, certainly
contributes to structural processes that disadvantage some people and
advantage others.21
Young
1990; Pierre Bourdieu describes this process as the development of
“cultural capital,” and inequalities among people in their
ability to attain and use cultural capital; see, for example, Bourdieu 1984.
Recent literature in political theory and multiculturalism uses the
term culture in a rather different way, namely, to refer primarily to
differences between groups based on ethnicity, nationality, or
religion.22
See, for example, Kymlicka 1995, Barry 2001a,
and Benhabib 2002. These three books have quite
different views about the implications of culture for politics, but they
all take nation, ethnicity or religion as paradigmatic of
culture.
Because of its easily shifting meanings, then, I have
concluded that the term “culture” is too vague to locate a set
of issues of justice not reducible to distribution which nevertheless help
produce and reproduce basic structures that affect people's life
chances.
Despite its wide usage, I think that the concept of
“recognition” also slides between several meanings, the most
common of which do not focus on the issues of stigmatization and exclusion
to which I want to call attention. First, sometimes groups claim that they
suffer injustice because others in the society fail or refuse to recognize
their members as expressing a distinctive form of living that ought to
have equal status with that of dominant groups. A politics of recognition,
second, sometime involves claims for self-government, either in the form
of a separate state or an autonomous region. A third meaning of
recognition as it appears in the literature does refer more to stigma and
exclusion than to positive claims for acknowledgement of forms of group
expression or to claims of self-governance. For my purposes here, I prefer
not to invoke the term recognition altogether, because it is ambiguous.
Rather I will refer to the issue of justice that concerns me with the term
“normalization”; I derive my understanding the the process of
normalization from the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith
Butler, and Michael Warner.23
Some people claim that they suffer injustice because others identify
them as belonging to groups which dominant ideologies construct as
abnormal, problematically different, or despicable. Especially when
dominant norms and expectations either encourage discrimination,
avoidance, segregation, harassment, or violence, or fail to discourage
these harms, those who suffer them are not only victims of individual
morally blameworthy actions, but also suffer systematic injustice. Issues
of justice such as these concern the way institutions, discourses, and
practices distinguish the normal and the deviant, and the privilege they
accord to persons or attributes understood as normal. While processes of
normalization have important and sometimes far reaching distributive
implications, they are not themselves distributions.24
Nancy Fraser has recently distinguished issues of recognition
that she says refer to status inequality from recognition issues that
refer to self-determination or culture expression, and this may roughly
correspond to the distinction I am drawing between issues of cultural
expression and self-government, on the one hand, and normativity on the
other. See Fraser 2003. In the mid 1970s Owen
Fiss argued that status inequality was an important issue of justice for
racialized groups in particular; this essay has recently been reprinted
with commentaries, including one by myself, in which I call attention to
the issue of injustice as status inequality that Fiss's essay raised.
See Fiss 2002; see also Young
2002.
The situation of people with disabilities illustrates the problems of
normalization most starkly. Most theorists of justice treat disability
under the distributive paradigm. Having a disability implies that a person
will not be able to compete for income and power as effectively as others,
and that therefore the “handicapped,” as this literature often
calls them, should receive compensation for their disadvantage.25
Rawls himself does not say anything
substantive about disability. The situation of people with disabilities is
central to the thinking of the group of philosophers called “luck
egalitarians,” however, including Ronald Dworkin, Richard Arneson,
Gerald Cohen, and John Roemer. For a critical discussion of the handling
of these thinkers of issues to do with disability, see Anderson 1999.
What such an approach to
justice for people with disabilities does not do, however, is inquire
about the basic structures that position some people as not
“competitive.” These philosophers seem to share with many
others the assumption that lacking specific bodily or mental functionings
automatically makes a person less competent than those that have them.
Scholars and advocates of people with disabilities question the
assumption that disability is a category of “natural”
misfortune and less competence. Whether a person is
“disabled,” they argue, depends far less on that person's
attributes and capacities than on the extent to which the infrastructure,
rules, and interactive expectations of the society make it difficult for
some people to develop and exercise capacities. Having little or no use of
one's legs, to take an obvious example, constitutes a
“handicap” only in a society whose basic structures include
frequent stairs, curbs, narrow doorways, or machines operated with
feet.26
Normalization consists in a set of social processes that elevate the
experience and capacities of some social segments into standards used to
judge everyone. In this process the attributes, comportments, or ways of
life that are “normal,” in the sense of exhibited by a
majority or by dominant social segments, come also to have the connotation
of being “best”. To the extent that other people do not fit or
fail to measure up to these standards because of their bodily capacities,
group-specific socialized habits and comportments, or cultural membership
or way of life, they tend to suffer stigmatization and disadvantage. The
assumptions carried by many institutional rules and practices often
operate to enforce and reinforce these norms that stigmatize and
disadvantage. These norms often make a large class of people deviant, and
the disadvantages they suffer as a result usually affect central aspects
of their lives.
In explicating his notion that his principles of justice pertains to a
fair system of social cooperation, Rawls explicitly assumes that free and
equal citizens are “normal and fully cooperating members of society
over a complete life.” The theory of justice assumes people who are
normal in this sense, and puts to the side “temporary disabilities
and also permanent disabilities or mental disorders so severe as to
prevent people from being cooperating members of society in the usual
sense.”27
Eva Feder Kittay argues against this
“setting aside” of disability; instead, a theory of justice
should begin from the facts of dependency and vulnerability of which some
disability is an example.
28 While I agree with her, here I
want to call attention to how Rawls's bracketing gesture misses an
element of basic structural processes. The “usual sense” in
which people are cooperating members of society harbors for many societies
both a prejudice that people with differing physical or mental impairments
cannot contribute to the same degree as others, and often presupposes
contingent physical structures and social expectations that make some
people appear less capable than they would appear within altered
structures and expectations.
I have lingered on the example of people with disabilities to
illustrate normalization as a process of injustice produced by social
structures. Many other persons suffer injustice through normalization
processes, such as many women, people who deviate from heterosexual norms,
or persons marked as racially different.
Many workplaces continue to assume that workers' lives conform to
traditionally masculine lifestyle norms. The policies and practices of
employers, that is, continue to assume that workers do not themselves
juggle family care responsibilities with their work day. Employers often
put workers at a disadvantage for for taking time off due to family
illness or refusing long hours because they have family responsibilities.
This is an oppressive normalization of particular life situations even
when some men suffer disadvantage because of it.
Many workplaces and other public institutions such as schools,
furthermore, assume that the bodies populating them never menstruate, are
pregnant, or lactate. They fail to accommodate to the particular needs of
women at certain times, sometimes causing them embarrassment, physical
discomfort, or worse.29
For an analysis of
the menstruating body as deviant in ways that have significant social
consequences, see Young 2005,
97–122.
People who are perceived as racially or ethnically different by
dominant groups, to take a different example, often find themselves
regarded as deviant in relation to conventions of politeness,
articulateness, or the appearance of honesty and trustworthiness, which
matter a great deal for the attainment of positions of authority or
significant responsibility. In North America and Europe being dark
skinned, in combination with carrying a habitus from the streets
of the segregated neighborhoods in which one has grown up, mark a person
in the eyes of some others as malign or incompetent. Such stigmatization
does much to impede a person's freedom to pursue their plans of
life.
From a Rawlsian perspective, one might say that these processes of
normalization conflict with a principle of equal opportunity, and they do.
The point in noticing them separately is to see that the unfair
discriminations they produce derive not from the explicit prejudices of
particular individuals or from public policies of explicit distinction and
exclusion, but rather from widespread but relatively unnoticed assumptions
embedded in institutional rules, the material infrastructure of social
action, and everyday habits of comportment and interaction. These
important elements in the basic structures of society call for social
theorizing like that of Charles Tilly30
or Pierre
Bourdieu to supplement Rawls's normative political philosophy.
Conclusion
I have here endorsed Rawls's claim that the subject of justice is
the basic structure of society. Taking that claim seriously, I have
suggested, entails more direct evaluation of the social processes that
produce the benefits and burdens of social cooperation than Rawls's
theory contains. Carrying through on that task involves noticing types of
issues of justice which are not best thought of in distributive terms, but
which are aspects of basic structural processes. This work means less
shifting away from Rawls's theory than deepening of some of its
central elements.
